Detective Story

Introduction

Though Edgar Allan Poe generally is considered the father of detective fiction, some historians of the genre point to ancient Greece and Herodotus’s tale of King Rhampsinitus or to the biblical story of Susanna and the Elders for the origins of this popular literary form. These putative sources share elements with mystery fiction—natural cunning, the cross-examination of witnesses, false clues—but lack major essentials. The same can be said about many other claimants, such as the popular crime narratives and rogue pseudomemoirs of eighteenth century England and also Voltaire’s Zadig: Ou, La Destinée, Histoire orientale (1748; originally as Memnon: Histoire orientale, 1747; Zadig: Or, The Book of Fate, 1749), in a chapter in which the hero uses analytical deduction to reach conclusions about things he has not seen. François-Eugène Vidocq’sMémoires de Vidocq, chef de la police de sûreté jusqu’en 1827 (1828-1829; Memoirs of Vidocq, Principal Agent of the French Police Until 1827, 1828-1829; revised as Histoire de Vidocq, chef de la police de sûreté: Écrite d’après lui-même, 1829), however, is a forerunner that was a direct influence on Poe and his successors. A former criminal who became the first head of the French police, Vidocq later set himself up as a private detective.

Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” —which takes place in Paris, as do his other mystery stories—is the seminal work from which all subsequent detective fiction descends. It is, first of all, the archetypal locked-room mystery, a subgenre in which a body is discovered in an apparently sealed room. Second, C. Auguste Dupin, the first fictional private detective, solves crimes that perplex the police and is the prototype of many later brilliant men (including Sherlock Holmes, Ellery Queen, and Hercule Poirot), whose activities are described by admiring chroniclers. Third, in this and the other two stories in which he appears (“The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Purloined Letter”), Dupin reaches solutions through what Poe called ratiocination, the process of logical and methodical reasoning. Finally, in “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” Dupin is a prototypical armchair detective, working from newspaper accounts to deduce a solution. In two other detective tales—”The Gold Bug” and “Thou Art the Man”—Poe also introduces devices that would become commonplace in the genre: false clues, the use of ballistics, a deciphered code, the detective as narrator, and the least likely suspect as culprit.

In the decades following the publication of these innovative stories, crime and detection were favorite subjects of the popular press in England, notably the sensational “penny dreadfuls” periodicals and Charles Dickens’s Household Words articles about the London police detective department, particularly its Inspector Field, who was the inspiration for Inspector Bucket of Dickens’s Bleak House (1852-1853). Another detective department member, Inspector Jonathan Whicher, is the source of Sergeant Cuff, Wilkie Collins’s methodical sleuth in The Moonstone (1868), the first English detective novel. Similar to Cuff is American Anna Katharine Green’s city detective Ebenezer Gryce, who debuted in The Leavenworth Case: A Lawyer’s Story (1878). These works and other crime literature soon were overshadowed by Arthur Conan Doyle’s mystery novels, A Study in Scarlet (1887) and The Sign of Four (1890), whose success led editor Herbert Greenhough Smith of London’s new Strand Magazine to ask Doyle for six Holmes stories, the first of which, “A Scandal in Bohemia,” appeared in July, 1891. They were so popular that Smith commissioned another series, and three mass-circulation American periodicals—Munsey’s Magazine, Ladies’ Home Journal, and McClure’s Magazine—also began to publish them.

Sherlock Holmes

With Dr. John Watson’s casebook of Sherlock Holmes, the detective story finally came into its own as a distinct genre. Building upon the example of Poe, a debt he acknowledged, Doyle created the genre’s indelible pattern: a crime attempted or committed, a sleuth either working independently or aiding the baffled police, and a solution arrived at by the detective. Significantly, he added a vital element. Whereas Poe’s Dupin is an undeveloped, shadowy figure, Doyle’s Holmes is a real person, and, in fifty-six stories, Doyle presents a myriad of information about the character, whose activities add details to his persona. A Nietzschean superman, Holmes not only acts superior to others but also is so. He is an intriguing eccentric, uses drugs, plays the violin, is a master of disguise, is almost passionless, is an expert in anatomy, chemistry, the law, and mathematics. He has written many scholarly monographs on such varied topics as bees, tobacco, and the Cornish language. Holmes puts his far-ranging intellect to practical use in the stories, which tends to personalize the narratives. The narrator, Dr. Watson, Holmes’s obsequious physician friend, also serves in this function. An honest, likable man of average intellect, he is one with whom the reader can identify. While some tales, particularly later ones, are marred by improbabilities, contradictions, and inexplicable lapses in Holmes’s deductive acuity, the detective’s mythic personality and the singular appeal of the milieus make such faults insignificant. Holmes is not only the exemplar of the fictional detective but also one of the world’s best-known literary characters.

Doyle wrote four long Holmes tales: A Study in Scarlet (1887), The Sign of Four (1890), The Hound of the Baskervilles (1901-1902), and The Valley of Fear (1915). He collected the short stories in five volumes: The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1892), The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894), The Return of Sherlock Holmes (1905), His Last Bow (1917), and The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes (1927). The dozen tales in the first collection rank among the best in the genre. Among them, “The Speckled Band” is the standard by which later locked-room mysteries are measured and is of interest, too, because it shows Holmes’s willingness to risk his life at the scene of a crime. “A Scandal in Bohemia” is memorable because of the detective’s confrontation with the seductive Irene Adler, a singer who dupes him but who remains, in memory, the one woman in his life. “The Red-Headed League” shows Holmes preventing a crime—a bank robbery—from being committed. The first tale in The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes is “Silver Blaze,” whose centerpiece is “the curious incident of the dog in the night-time,” which provides Holmes with perhaps the most singular clue of his career. The volume also includes “The Adventure of the Gloria Scott,” which Watson says was Holmes’s first case; “The Greek Interpreter,” in which Holmes’s older brother Mycroft is introduced; and “The Final Problem,” intended to be the last Holmes story, and in which he apparently is killed in a confrontation with his archrival, the criminal Dr. Moriarty. In response to public outcry, Doyle cleverly resurrected Holmes, and the thirteen stories in The Return of Sherlock Holmes include some of the best in the canon: “The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,” “The Adventure of the Abbey Grange,” and “The Adventure of the Priory School.” The stories in the final collection, The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes, are generally inferior to Doyle’s earlier ones, and the group is of interest primarily because Dr. Watson tells only nine of the twelve, the novelist functions as narrator of one, and Holmes himself relates two.

In the Wake of Holmes

Holmes’s popularity spawned other sleuths who either share some of his major traits or are almost polar opposites. Among the supermen-detectives, for example, is Professor Augustus S. F. X. Van Dusen, the creation of Jacques Futrelle, an American from Georgia. Van Dusen, an eccentric genius with many university degrees, is the omniscient sleuth in two collections, The Thinking Machine (1907; also known as The Problem of Cell Thirteen) and The Thinking Machine on the Case (1908; also known as The Professor on the Case). Futrelle’s best-known story is “The Problem of Cell Thirteen,” a locked-room mystery in which Van Dusen escapes from prison, disproving the challenge that “no man can think himself out of a cell.” Another superman in the same mode is Max Carrados, Ernest Bramah’s blind detective, who relies not only upon his deductive skills but also upon his superior sensory perception. For instance, he can tell that someone is wearing a false mustache because he smells adhesive and can read newspaper headlines by an acute sense of touch that enables him to distinguish areas of printer’s ink. Carrados also has what Bramah labels an elusive sixth sense, actually just a keen understanding of human psychology. In the Doyle pattern, Bramah provides a myriad of details about Carrados’s life, so he is a convincingly credible character, and the extent to which he has overcome the limitations of his affliction makes him engaging and likable. Accompanied on rounds by his Watson, Louis Carlyle, a private investigator who refers cases to him, independently wealthy Carrados epitomizes the gentleman sleuth, choosing problems that interest him and refusing fees. Like Holmes, Carrados sometimes solves cases before they cross the line to serious criminality, including at least one (“The Clever Mrs. Straithwaite”) that is little more than a domestic farce embellished by an alleged jewel theft and phony insurance claim. Unlike most of his peers, Bramah sometimes used contemporary issues as the linchpin of his stories, such as “The Knight’s Cross Signal Problem” (anti-British feelings in India) and “The Missing Witness Sensation” (an Irish Sinn Fein kidnapping). Also atypical is the fact that few of Carrados’s cases involve murder. Ellery Queen described Bramah’s first collection of mysteries, Max Carrados (1914), as “one of the ten best volumes of detective shorts ever written,” and they remain eminently readable.

Holmes Contemporaries and Successors

In deliberate contrast with the Holmes pattern, Arthur Morrison, a Doyle contemporary who also published in The Strand Magazine, wrote eighteen stories featuring law clerk Martin Hewitt, a determinedly ordinary man whose cases a journalist friend narrates. G. K. Chesterton’s Father Brown also seems to be unexceptional but proves to be otherwise in fifty witty stories (published from 1911 to 1935) that are constructed around paradoxes. A prototype for later clergymen-sleuths, Father Brown relies on intuition and insight more than on deduction and clues but, like Holmes, is a keen observer, trying to get inside the mind of a suspect and noticing what others overlook, as in “The Invisible Man,” in which the culprit disguises himself as a mailman, someone so familiar that people disregard him. Sympathetic toward criminals, the priest sometimes lets them go free so they can repent their sins and reform. Another detective who, like Father Brown, appears to be unexceptional, is M. McDonnell Bodkin’s Paul Beck, who also was deliberately conceived as the opposite of Holmes. Beck claims to muddle his way through cases, and other professionals scorn him, but his native wit serves him well. Similar to Holmes as a master of disguise but otherwise very different is A. J. Raffles, a gentleman burglar, safecracker, amateur cricketer—the brainchild of E. W. Hornung, Doyle’s brother-in-law. Supposedly created as an intentional contrast with Holmes (Hornung unequivocally describes his sleuth as a villain), Raffles is crime fiction’s first antihero and was so popular that for a half century after Hornung’s death, Barry Perowne produced almost two dozen more volumes of Raffles stories and novels. Holmes often used his extensive scientific knowledge as a tool to solve cases, and following in these procedural footsteps is Dr. John Evelyn Thorndyke, the creation of R. Austin Freeman, a British physician like Doyle. Beginning in 1907 and continuing for more than three decades, Dr. Thorndyke (barrister, physician, forensic scientist) reigned as the genre’s premier “scientific detective” in convincingly realistic novels and stories narrated by another doctor, Christopher Jervis, with whom Thorndyke shares his lodgings. Often shown delving into a green box filled with chemicals and instruments, Thorndyke is a pure scientist who focuses upon things rather than people and thus is the opposite of Father Brown and a refinement of one aspect of Holmes. Freeman’s other major contribution to the genre is his invention (in The Singing Bone, 1912) of the inverted mystery, a form in which the reader witnesses a murder being committed and then follows the detective’s deliberate process of discovery as he moves toward solving the case. Later noteworthy examples of this technique are Francis Iles’s novels Malice Aforethought (1931) and Before the Fact (1932) as well as the Columbo television series, created by William Link and Richard Levinson.

By calling some of his Holmes stories adventures, Doyle made clear that the sleuth’s modus operandi involved physical as well as intellectual labors. Some of Holmes’s descendants, however, treat crime solving almost solely as an intellectual exercise. The prototype of these armchair detectives is Baroness Orczy’s Old Man in the Corner, featured in thirty-eight tales between 1901 and 1925. While sitting in a London tearoom drinking milk and unraveling knots in a piece of string, the slight old man reviews newspaper reports and listens to journalist Polly Burton recount puzzling crimes. Noting details the police overlook and making deductions based on ratiocination and intuition, he works cases backward until he arrives at solutions. Decades later, Rex Stout’s sedentary Nero Wolfe donned the Old Man’s mantle. Baroness Orczy made another significant contribution to the genre: attorney Patrick Mulligan, whose cases were collected in Skin o’ My Tooth: His Memoirs by His Confidential Clerk (1928). Like Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason years later, Mulligan is absolutely loyal to his clients and engages in all that is necessary, even skirting the law, to free them. Another unscrupulous hero that influenced Gardner is Melville Davisson Post’s New York attorney Randolph Mason, whose creed is that his guilty clients must avoid punishment, and he labors mightily toward either their acquittal or a circumvention of the law. Post’s other major crime fiction character is the antithesis of Mason: Uncle Abner, a pre-Civil War Virginia country squire who is a Bible-quoting man of absolute integrity. Ellery Queen ranked the Post collection Uncle Abner: Master of Mysteries (1918) second only to Poe’s tales in the corpus of American detective short fiction. Of these stories, Uncle Abner is a stellar locked-room whodunit.

American Pulp Magazines

During the decades covered thus far of the developing crime fiction genre, the short story was the dominant form, though most authors also wrote novels. Novels became the preferred form after World War I because of social, economic, and other developments, not the least of which was the rise of lending libraries in the United States and Great Britain, but many magazines in both countries continued to provide outlets for mystery stories.

Among them were the American “pulps,” which flourished between the world wars and published all kinds of popular fiction. The first crime fiction pulp magazine, Detective Story, debuted in 1915, and by the 1930’s many different pulps were devoted solely to the genre. Initially, most of their stories had Holmes-like Victorian settings, but soon an increasing number featured contemporary American milieus. Black Mask, which first appeared in 1920, quickly became the preeminent pulp, and its most prominent detective was Race Williams, whose 1923 debut story was “Knights of the Open Palm,” in which he infiltrates the Ku Klux Klan. The brainchild of Carroll John Daly (who earlier had created a sleuth dubbed Three-Gun Mack), Williams became the first popular hard-boiled sleuth in a long line of such private investigators, including Mickey Spillane’s Mike Hammer and Lawrence Block’s Matt Scudder. A superb gunman, Williams is a fearless, snarling tough guy who engages in whatever seems necessary—violence, brutality, even murder—to administer his instinctive kind of justice. The stories sometimes cross the line to melodrama, and Williams is closer in ancestry to an American cowboy hero than to Dupin or Holmes.

A few issues after Williams’s debut, Dashiell Hammett introduced Black Mask readers to the San Francisco-based Continental Op in “Arson Plus.” A hard-boiled private eye who generally is considered the prototypical one, he is credible, unheroic, and thoroughly professional, quite unlike the swashbuckler Williams. Drawing from his own experiences as a private investigator, Hammett created a detective devoted to his craft and usually successful at it, more concerned with getting facts than with engaging in violent confrontations, not at all motivated by the lure of money (as Williams is), and willing to cooperate with the police when necessary. He is a deliberate and careful worker, patiently gathering details, shadowing suspects for hours at a time, reviewing newspaper files and company records, and staking out houses. When necessary, the Op wields a gun effectively but does not engage in Williams-like heroics, and though feelings sometimes dictate his responses to people and situations, he realizes that “emotions are nuisances during business hours.” With their realistic urban American settings, terse style, and often cynical tone, the Continental Op stories set the pattern for subsequent American private-eye fiction. Hammett, then, is the first author in a continuum that includes Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Robert B. Parker, and Bill Pronzini. Some eight decades had passed after Poe’s seminal stories of the 1840’s before a full-fledged American detective hero would be introduced.

In 1933, Chandler published his first story in Black Mask, “Blackmailers Don’t Shoot.” A slower writer and more conscious craftsman than his peers—he published just nineteen pulp stories between 1933 and 1939, when his first novel, The Big Sleep (1939), came out—Chandler endowed his detective, variously, Mallory, Dalmas, Malvern, Carmady, and unnamed, before he eventually settled upon Philip Marlowe, with an overt compassion that in the Continental Op had been merely implicit. A college-educated chess player who listens to classical music and quotes poetry, Chandler’s introspective private eye is a brave loner with a strong moral streak, a twentieth century knight who says that trouble is his business. Resisting the corruption, spawned by money and power, that surrounds him, he tries to restore decency to his milieu, the mean streets of Los Angeles. (Years later, Macdonald would turn to Chandler’s Marlowe as the pattern for his series detective Lew Archer.) In a classic essay, “The Simple Art of Murder,” Chandler says,

Hammett gave murder back to the kind of people that commit it for reasons, not just to provide a corpse; and with the means at hand, not with hand-wrought dueling pistols, curare, and tropical fish. He put these people down on paper as they are, and he made them talk and think in the language they customarily used for these purposes.

The words also serve as Chandler’s credo, which is apparent, too, in his novels, among the best of which are The Big Sleep, Farewell, My Lovely (1940), The Lady in the Lake (1943), and The Long Goodbye (1953). Interestingly, the books to a considerable extent blend and elaborate upon previously published Chandler stories—”cannibalization,” he called the process. These four novels and many of his stories, with their enduring thematic relevance, transcend the genre category and rise to the standard of mainstream literature.

Guilty Vicarage Crime Fiction

While Daly, Hammett, Chandler, and their pulp peers were honing a distinctively American innovative approach to crime fiction, most American whodunit writers were still producing stories and books in the so-called Guilty Vicarage mold, basically English in setting and attitude, with detectives and plots that were almost as eccentric and aristocratic as those of Doyle and his followers. The phenomenally successful Philo Vance books by S. S. Van Dine, Mary Roberts Rinehart’s equally popular novels, and the early Ellery Queen are prime examples. In Great Britain, the successful old formula remained the order of the day, though with significant variations.

A landmark event in British crime fiction was the 1913 publication of E. C. Bentley’s Trent and the Last Case, which he intended as a gentle burlesque of detective conventions. It introduced the fallible sleuth and ironically is widely considered to have inaugurated the golden age of the English detective novel. (John Franklin Carter, a 1930’s journalist and White House official who wrote such mysteries as “Diplomat,” called Bentley the father of the contemporary detective story.) As Bentley explained his approach, it was

a more modern sort of character-drawing. . . . The idea at the bottom of it was to get as far away from the Holmes tradition as possible. Trent . . . does not take himself at all seriously. He is not a scientific expert; he is not a professional crime investigator. He is an artist, a painter, by calling, who has strayed accidentally into the business of crime journalism. . . . He is not superior to the feelings of average humanity; he does not stand aloof from mankind, but enjoys the society of his fellow creatures and makes friends with everybody. He even goes so far as to fall in love. He does not regard the Scotland Yard men as a set of bungling half-wits, but has the highest respect for their trained abilities. All very unlike Holmes. . . .

Another departure from what Bentley saw as the artificiality and sterility of the Holmes pattern is his adherence to the fair-play doctrine, with the reader being given all of the evidence, taken into Trent’s confidence, and learning what he thinks. Trent Intervenes (1938) is a gathering of stories about Philip Trent in which these principles are at work, a dozen tales generally more complex than most detective short stories. Among the best are “The Genuine Tabard,” “The Sweet Shot,” and the humorous “The Inoffensive Captain.”

Peter Wimsey and Mr. Fortune

Dorothy L. Sayers said that she based her detective, Lord Peter Wimsey , in part on Philip Trent, and in fact, both are friendly, tactful, and gently humorous human beings. Historian and critic as well as practitioner of the craft, Sayers is considered by some to be a stellar writer of detective fiction, with imaginatively conceived, carefully wrought plots, and original means of murder; but to others she is verbose, writes peripheral and lengthy dialogues, and has a pompous snob, Lord Peter Wimsey, as her detective. Indeed, some of her stories and novels are more manners narratives than whodunits. Wimsey appears in twenty-one short stories, most of which proceed more briskly than do the novels, and in the later ones he is less a dandy and more a sleuth. The first collection Lord Peter Views the Body (1928) has a dozen stories, of which “The Abominable History of the Man with the Copper Fingers” is the among the most effective in its buildup of suspense. Of the twelve stories in Hangman’s Holiday (1933) , Wimsey is in just four, and six of them feature another Sayers amateur sleuth, wine salesman Montague Egg. Of special interest in the volume is “The Man Who Knew How,” which has no detective. In the Teeth of the Evidence, and Other Stories (1939), the third collection, has two Wimsey stories, five Egg, and ten nonseries, one of the best being “The Inspiration of Mr. Budd.” In sum, Sayers’s nearly forty stories are characterized by variety, cunning plots, a tempering infusion of wit, and expansive development of a social milieu, traits that combine to make them classics of the genre. Lord Peter, who traces his pedigree to William the Conqueror, is the prototype for other aristocratic sleuths, including Margery Allingham’s Mr. Campion (who renounced his noble tag), John Creasey’s The Toff, Martha Grimes’s Melrose Plant (who declined his earldom), and Elizabeth George’s Inspector Thomas Lynley (eighth Earl of Asherton).

Reggie Fortune, H. C. Bailey’s amateur detective, who is a physician, surgeon, and forensic pathologist, has the same aristocratic affectations and prejudices as Campion and Wimsey, but this genial and sensitive man, whose cases often have him helping mistreated and endangered children and who works closely with Scotland Yard, also descends from Dr. Thorndyke and Father Brown. In the introduction to a group of Fortune stories, Bailey wrote about his sleuth being described as having an “old-fashioned” mind.

Insofar as this refers to morals it means that he holds by the standard principles of conduct and responsibility, of right and wrong, of sin and punishment. He does not always accept the law of a case as justice and has always been known to act on his own responsibility in contriving the punishment of those who could not legally be found guilty or the immunity of those who were not legally innocent.

Bailey’s fair-play mysteries were very popular between the world wars (his first collection, Call Mr. Fortune, was published in England in 1920, and over a quarter century he produced almost one hundred), their length reflecting the complexity of the plots and his substantive characterizations. Among the best are “The Angel’s Eye,” with its rare twist at the end; “The Thistle Down,” in which murder is disguised as suicide; and “The Long Barrow,” which shows Fortune, the intuitive detective and judge of character, at his best.

Agatha Christie

Agatha Christie, a Bailey and Sayers contemporary, began writing when Holmes took “his last bow” in 1917. The world’s most widely read whodunit writer, and one of the most prolific, she turned out more than eighty novels and short-story collections. Her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles: A Detective Story, was published in 1920; four more novels plus a Hercule Poirot collection of stories followed in the next five years, and in 1926, she produced The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, which was both widely popular and highly controversial since the Watson-like narrator turns out to be the murderer. Although Christie built most of her narratives for half a century upon a standard template, she often springs Ackroyd-like surprises, but however much the deceptions perplex readers, she always plays fair. Dorothy L. Sayers’s 1928 defense of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is applicable to most Christie whodunits: “All the necessary data are given. The reader ought to be able to guess the criminal, if he is sharp enough, and nobody can ask for more than this. It is, after all, the reader’s job to keep his wits about him, and, like the perfect detective, to suspect everybody.”

Christie’s early works usually have the tripartite Doyle pattern of a private sleuth (Holmes/Poirot) and a foil (Watson/Captain Hastings) helping the police (Inspector Lestrade/Inspector Japp), but within a decade she sent ignorant Hastings back to Argentina, and Poirot subsequently worked on his own, with occasional assistance from a valet or secretary. Poirot and Christie’s other sleuths—with the exception of husband-and-wife team Tommy and Tuppence Beresford—fundamentally are loners, detached emotionally and intellectually, even from those close to them, much in the manner of Holmes and the Old Man in the Corner. Nevertheless, she often shows them with families, because many of her crimes take place at family gatherings or have family members as suspects. Also, a recurrent Christie crime scene is a village that apparently is a model of stability and respectability but in which dirty secrets lurk beneath the surface. As her sleuth Miss Marple puts it: “Human nature is much the same everywhere, and, of course, one has opportunities of observing it at closer quarters in a village.” Since old Miss Marple relies on parallels to solve crimes, St. Mary Mead must be quite different from the bucolic place it seems to be. Observation, as Miss Marple demonstrates in stories and novels, is a key to solving a Christie mystery, but unlike Doyle and Freeman, this writer does not require her readers to know all manner of arcane things, only that they pay close attention to details. At the same time, Christie is a skilled perpetrator of red herrings, distracting readers and leading them to focus upon irrelevancies. She also surprises by fingering sympathetic characters as criminals and apparent victims as villains, as in “Three Blind Mice” (the source of her play The Mousetrap, pr. 1952), “The Bloodstained Pavement,” and “Triangle at Rhodes.”

Poirot Investigates (1924), Christie’s third Poirot book, is her first collection of stories, fourteen in all, each of which is narrated by Captain Hastings. They illustrate Poirot’s dictum that the little gray cells in his head are all he needs to solve cases. “With logic,” he believes, “one can accomplish anything!” Nevertheless, he is not at all an armchair detective, since he often travels far afield, including to Egypt in “The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb.” An armchair detective in the Old Man tradition is Miss Marple in The Thirteen Problems (1932; pb. in U.S. as The Tuesday Club Murders, 1933), a collection in which people describe cases to her. Knitting by her fireplace, she listens to the tales of murders, smuggling, and other diversions; draws her parallels; considers suspects; and without moving far afield, comes up with solutions.

Unlike Sayers, Christie is not a prose stylist, has no literary pretensions, and does not linger over character development. She provides only those personal facts and traits necessary to illuminate a situation. Even her sleuths become three-dimensional people only over time, through an incremental accumulation of details—bits and pieces—in a series of works. The others—villains, victims, bystanders—remain shallow types. To Christie, the mystery itself is what matters.

In the collection Partners in Crime (1929), Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, husband-and-wife sleuths from the 1922 novel The Secret Adversary, are involved in espionage and international intrigue, having learned their new trade through Tommy’s reading of detective novels. The stories parody the styles and methods of writers Tommy has read—Baroness Orczy, Chesterton, Freeman—and are generally successful pastiches. They thus are an early manifestation of Christie’s inclination to experiment while not straying far from the genre’s traditional bounds. In 1930, she again departed from the commonplace with The Mysterious Mr. Quin, twelve stories (about murder, disappearances of jewelry and people, and reuniting former lovers). The nominal sleuth is Mr. Satterthwaite, but strange Mr. Harley Quin serves as guide and catalyst, helping his inadequate friend unravel the mysteries. The tales are a tentative Christie attempt at creating an unreal, almost supernatural atmosphere, something to which she sporadically returned throughout her career, with mixed results. For example, three years later, in 1933, she published The Hound of Death, and Other Stories, a salmagundi of assorted tales of the macabre, occult, and supernatural, which also includes what may be her best story, “Witness for the Prosecution.” Another collection featuring a minor Christie sleuth is Parker Pyne Investigates, 1934 (pb. in U.S. as Mr. Parker Pyne, Detective), a dozen stories about a “happiness consultant,” who advertises his services in the newspaper. After hearing people’s woeful tales, Pyne turns to a stable of helpmates for assistance in restoring clients’ happiness, jewels, whatever. A variation on the armchair detective form, this unexceptional group is of interest primarily because it introduces (as a member of Pyne’s stable) Mrs. Ariadne Oliver, a whodunit writer (Christie’s alter ego) who is the sleuth in The Pale Horse, a 1961 novel. Christie’s prime collection is The Labours of Hercules: Short Stories (1947; pb. in U.S. as Labours of Hercules: New Adventures in Crime by Hercule Poirot), twelve Poirot cases that are modern correspondences to the challenges with which the mythological Hercules was confronted. Though it echoes somewhat other works by Christie and her peers, this varied set of problems is filled with clever twists, and a nice touch is the increasing difficulty of Poirot’s labors as he moves through the dozen.

Productive short-story writer that Christie surely was, her bibliography seems lengthier than it actually is, because her publishers sometimes changed story titles, often gave different titles to the same volumes for American and British markets, and regularly compiled new collections from old pieces. Christie herself frequently engaged in more substantive recycling. For example, the plots of Death on the Nile (1937) and Evil Under the Sun (1941) are almost the same, and the latter is an expansion of the idea of “Triangle at Rhodes” from four years earlier. “The Incredible Theft” is an elaboration of “The Submarine Plans,” which itself is indebted to Doyle. Two more examples of recycling: The Mystery of the Blue Train (1928) has its source in “The Plymouth Express,” and “The Yellow Iris” is the inspiration for the 1945 novel Remembered Death (1945; pb. in U.S. as Sparkling Cyanide). To record such recycling is not to diminish Christie’s fertile imagination, which produced a vast body of novels, stories, and plays with unexpected variations on familiar situations. With rare exceptions, the reader must cope with cardboard characters, flat style, and predictable settings, but these weaknesses become unimportant when one gets hooked, in her best works, by a typically intricate Christie puzzle.

Ellery Queen

During the height of Christie’s popularity on both sides of the Atlantic, Ellery Queen became the best-known American name in the genre as both a crime-fiction sleuth and as the pseudonym of Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee. As Queen, they wrote novels and stories; in 1941 founded Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine (EQMM), which rejuvenated detective short fiction and remains an indispensable outlet for novice and established writers; edited anthologies that helped shaped the canon; and served as the genre’s unofficial bibliographers. Created in imitation of Philo Vance, an American Wimsey, the Queen character (in his early manifestations) is a pseudosophisticate and pseudointellectual dandy with a pince-nez. The first book of Queen stories, The Adventures of Ellery Queen, was published in 1934, and its subtitle—Problems in Deduction—unequivocally places it squarely in the Holmes tradition, as does “The Adventure of . . . “ start to each title. Central to the stories is how young Queen solves sometimes bizarre riddles, such as finding a kidnapped banker in “The Adventure of the Three Lame Men.” Notable, too, is “The Adventure of the Mad Tea Party,” a clever narrative whose events parallel those in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (1865). A collection of nine stories, The New Adventures of Ellery Queen, appeared in 1940. Of four with sports backgrounds, one is a classic, “Man Bites Dog,” in which Queen is a kind of armchair detective, solving a murder while watching a baseball game. Though Queen as short-story writer—there are five more volumes—did not advance the genre, he has left a number of imaginatively conceived puzzles that a delightful sleuth solves by credible reasoning and analysis.

Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine has launched, nurtured, and sustained many careers, among them that of Edward D. Hoch. In addition to several novels, he has written about eight hundred short stories since his 1955 debut, and in 1973 he began a decades-long run of at least one story in every issue of EQMM. Among his many series characters are Rand, a cipher expert and spy; Nick Velvet, a thief who steals odd things for a fee (water from a pool, a baseball team); Simon Ark, supposedly two thousand years old, who uses logic to solve supernatural crimes; and Ben Snow, an 1880’s cowboy who solves a murder during a stagecoach ride. The stories are traditional whodunits seasoned with unusual characters and situations.

Perhaps the most unforgettable EQMM tale ever published is Stanley Ellin’s first story, “The Specialty of the House.” Like his other carefully wrought tales (which he produced at a rate of about one a year and which won many awards), it is not a traditional whodunit but rather a macabre horror tale and was one of a number of Ellin stories dramatized on Alfred Hitchcock’s 1950’s television series. Julian Symbols credits Ellin, whose “ingenuity is turned to ends which produce the authentic shiver,” with having brought imagination back to the crime short story. His best, according to Symbols, “go beyond the usual limits of the genre and turn into fables, occasionally tender but more often sharp, about the grotesque shapes of urban society and the dreams of the human beings who live in it.”

Ross Macdonald

Also transcending the limits of the genre, but differently from Ellin, is Ross Macdonald, whose career ran from the 1940’s to the 1970’s. Having begun as a spy novelist, Macdonald in 1947 published Blue City (as Kenneth Millar), his first hard-boiled novel in the Hammett-Chandler tradition. In it and his later works, the fully realized characters and atypically complex plots are vehicles for such recurring themes as the Oedipal search for a father and variations on how people corrupt the American dream by greed and lack of vision. Each Macdonald novel is a tragedy wherein destruction is wrought from within the characters, who unleash avenging furies whose disastrous forces endure through generations. Through the efforts of private eye Lew Archer, the moral center of almost all the tales, evil finally is purged, and those who remain can look ahead to normal lives.

Macdonald wrote only nine stories, mainly early in his career. Two were published in EQMM, and all were collected, with some revisions, in Lew Archer, Private Investigator (1977). They are set in Southern California, like most of the novels, and echo them. One of the EQMM stories, “Find the Woman,” opens with what would become a familiar Macdonald motif: a parent hiring Archer to search for a missing child. “Wild Goose Chase,” the second EQMM story, is a domestic tragedy built around entangled relationships and greed and has an ironic twist of fate at the end. In other words, it has the standard mix of Macdonald’s novels: posturing and duplicitous people, young victims, troubled women, and arrogant yet insecure and unhappy rich people unable to shake their pasts. Several other stories in the volume, though simpler in concept and less nuanced than his later novels, also have intergenerational themes.

Macdonald Followers

Indebted though he was to Hammett and Chandler, Macdonald moved beyond their influence, shaping more complex plots that exemplified his moral and social themes, writing in a more polished and allusive style, and muting the hard-boiled traits of his compassionate and introspective private eye. Among Macdonald’s descendants in the hard-boiled Hammett-Chandler tradition are Robert B. Parker, Bill Pronzini, and Lawrence Block. Of the trio, only Pronzini has produced volumes of short stories, Casefile (1983) and Graveyard Plots: The Best Short Stories of Bill Pronzini (1985), both of which feature a private eye known as Nameless who first appeared in a 1968 Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine story, “It’s a Lousy World.” There is a wistful, nostalgic quality to Nameless. Like Hammett’s Op, he is middle-aged, overweight, and based in San Francisco. After working in Army intelligence and the San Francisco police department, he becomes a private eye and now lives alone in a dirty apartment whose only orderly area is where he keeps thousands of old pulp magazines. Nameless dreams about early pulp detectives, fantasizes about being one of them, and always carries a magazine to read at odd moments. Emotional, compassionate, and a worrier, he does not carry a gun and is closer to Marlowe and Archer than to Williams, Hammer, or Sam Spade. Pronzini’s method also has an affinity with traditional crime writers because of his focus upon clues and the development of puzzles with surprising resolutions. Like Chandler, he has expanded stories into novels.

Dick Francis

In the last third of the twentieth century, EQMM was one of the few remaining general circulation magazine outlets for crime short stories, and because the economics of publishing favored the novel over the shorter form, most major writers of the period—such as Dick Francis, P. D. James, Elmore Leonard, Martha Grimes, Tony Hillerman, and Ed McBain—produced relatively few stories. Francis, for instance, began as a novelist in 1962 (Dead Cert) and produced thirty-five more before publishing his first story collection, Field of Thirteen, in 1998. Eight of the stories date from 1975 to 1980 and five previously unpublished ones Francis called “recent.” Like the novels, all have horse-racing backgrounds or themes, but there the resemblance stops. Absent are the novels’ admirable young men, narrator-heroes who reluctantly are caught up in life-threatening challenges for which they are temperamentally unprepared but who nevertheless excise corruption and restore the code of honor and normal tranquillity to their world, whose locus usually is the Jockey Club. On the other hand, the stories, such as “Raid at Kingdom Hill” and “The Day of the Losers,” generally do not have such a moral core, are peopled by rogues rather than criminals, often lack violence and death, and frequently have a whimsical tone. The aforementioned stories, as well as “Haig’s Death,” “Blind Chance,” “Nightmare,” and “Song for Mona,” end in an O. Henry-like ironic manner, quite unlike the typically straightforward and fast-paced conclusions of the novels. Only the last of these stories, one of several about a parent-child relationship (a recurring motif, too, in the novels), develops a major character with the emotional complexity and intensity common to the novels. The stories, in sum, are skillfully plotted entertainments that modestly engage the reader’s puzzle-solving abilities.

Rumpole of the Bailey

The surprise twists with which Francis wraps up his carefully wrought plots also are standard devices in John Mortimer’s stories featuring London barrister Horace Rumpole, whose international popularity rivals that of Holmes. Since his first appearance in Rumpole of the Bailey (1978), the self-described Old Bailey hack has demonstrated his wit, compassion, knowledge of William Shakespeare and William Wordsworth, and sometimes even legal acumen in dozens of stories (and a short novel) gathered in ten collections and dramatized for television. In “Rumpole and the Younger Generation,” which opens the 1978 book, he introduces himself in the following manner: “I, who have a mind full of old murders, legal anecdotes, and memorable fragments of the Oxford Book of English Verse (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch’s edition) together with a dependable knowledge of bloodstains, blood groups, fingerprints, and forgery by typewriter; I, who am now the oldest member of my Chambers, take up my pen at this advanced age during a lull in business. . . . “ Though he has not risen to Queen’s Counsel and most of his cases are ones his colleagues shun, Rumpole is satisfied with his lot, perhaps because he almost always bests nominal superiors, including judges and the boorish head of his chambers. Typically, a Rumpole story has two complementary plots, courtroom and personal, the latter either a domestic crisis between Rumpole and his wife Hilda (referred to as “She Who Must Be Obeyed”) or a problem in the courts or among the aging barrister’s colleagues and is thematically related to the primary plot. The subplots not only entertain but also further characterize this unlikely hero, who selflessly rescues the personal reputations and careers of ambitious younger barristers, and whose insights and slyness enable him to shape people and situations to his own purposes. These traits also serve him well in the courtroom, where his orations, deft combinations of emotion, wit, and legal legerdemain, normally carry the day. Confessing in his first adventure that he only feels”truly alive and happy in Law Courts,” Rumpole also admits to “a singular distaste for the law.” Indeed, his advocacy on behalf of mainly worthless clients (frequently, one of the Timson clan of petty criminals, whose escapades have helped support Rumpole through much of his career) relies not so much upon legal knowledge as upon detection skills and the ability to judge character. These talents link him to Holmes, from whom Rumpole often quotes, and many of the stories follow the Holmes pattern; however, Rumpole’s moral sense, liberalism, and comic voice distinguish him from Holmes. The humor takes the form either of improbable occurrences, which Rumpole cleverly initiates and nurtures, or misunderstood statements and actions.

A 1990 collection of six tales, Rumpole à la Carte, is a typical mix. In the title story, the barrister unhappily confronts nouvelle cuisine in a three-star London restaurant to which his wife’s expatriate cousin takes them. Ironically, the owner-chef, whose food and establishment Rumpole had roundly insulted, later hires Rumpole to defend him in a case that may destroy his business. In “Rumpole at Sea,” Hilda books the couple on a two-week cruise over her husband’s objections, and among the passengers, unhappily, is one of Rumpole’s high court nemeses, Mr. “Miscarriage of Justice” Graves. These adversaries become involved in a shipboard mystery that Graves bungles but that Rumpole solves. In “Rumpole for the Prosecution,” as the title reveals, the old barrister becomes, for the first time in his career, a prosecuting attorney, but even in this atypical role his shrewd instincts prevail, and in a curious turnabout he secures an acquittal for the accused. Though his character remains fundamentally the same through his career, he regularly is confronted with new experiences. The 1995 Rumpole and the Angel of Death, for example, has a story about hunters and animal rights (“Rumpole and the Way Through the Woods”) and another that takes the Old Bailey barrister to the European Court of Human Rights (“Rumpole and the Rights of Man”). In an epistolary nod to Dr. Watson, Mortimer in this collection also uses, for the first time, a narrator other than Rumpole. “Hilda’s Story” is in the form of a letter from Mrs. Rumpole to a friend, “the story Rumpole will never tell.”

Thus, within his format of mystery mixed with humor, Mortimer presents an insider’s view of England’s legal system, with hypocritical barristers and biased, even ignorant, judges. Rumpole, an iconoclast fighting the establishment, sometimes is a nonconformist upholding his own interests, but more often he struggles on behalf of a kindred soul, an unrepentant outsider of some sort.

Building upon the model of Poe’s four stories of the 1840’s, Doyle in the late nineteenth century brought the crime story to its fullest fruition, and as the twentieth century was drawing to a close, Mortimer was creating a body of tales whose international popularity came to rival most of those that preceded them. Among the many American and British sleuths that have advanced the genre while entertaining generations of readers since the mid-nineteenth century, these authors’ three creations stand apart and above: Dupin as the progenitor of all that follows, Holmes as the brilliant exponent of the mind-boggling arts of detection, and Rumpole as the smart but more realistic and humane character within a provocative thematic context.

Recent American Contributions

The popularity of the short-story genre in American crime fiction has flourished in the past decades. In 1997, the first volume in The Best American Mystery Stories series was published by Houghton Mifflin. Each volume features a well-known writer serving as editor, and each volume has included a wide array of styles and types of mystery stories. In his introduction to the 1997 volume, Penzler notes that “the natural form for the traditional mystery is not the novel but the short story,” explaining further that detective stories often revolve around a single clue, “which can be discovered, divulged, and its importance explained in a few pages.” Series editor Otto Penzler also fostered the publication of The Best American Stories of the Century by Houghton Mifflin in 2000. Many excellent writers contribute both novels and short stories to the genre, and two of the most acclaimed are Marcia Muller and Michael Connelly.

Marcia Muller

Hailed as the first American woman to write a hardboiled detective novel featuring a female investigator, Marcia Muller has written more than thirty-five novels, most featuring detective Sharon McCone. Muller also has cowritten and coedited novels and story collections with her husband, Pronzini, who writes the “Nameless Detective” series. She has written numerous short stories in both the mystery and Western genres, which have been published in various magazines and collections. All of these accomplishments led to the Mystery Writers of America naming her Grand Master in 2005.

McCone begins her career as a private investigator with paltry office space in a building that houses a legal cooperative called All Souls. McCone and the lawyers share the house and resources, and many of her cases come from their referrals. After several novels, McCone is able to move from her closet into a larger space in All Souls, and in The Broken Promise Land (1996) she opens her own offices with several staff members, including her assistant from All Souls and her nephew.

Muller has published three mystery short-story collections, with two of those dedicated to McCone: The McCone Files (1995) and McCone and Friends (2000). The third collection, Somewhere in the City (2007) has twelve McCone stories included among the nineteen total. Six of those twelve had appeared in the earlier two collections; the remaining six had appeared in various magazines and anthologies.

The crimes being investigated in the stories tend to be more straightforward, which is not surprising, given the length, but Muller never scrimps on character development and suspense. In addition, Muller imbues many of the short stories with a stronger sense of humor than is seen in many of the novel-length cases. “If You Can’t Take the Heat” features McCone posing as a new employee at a charter airline in order to uncover the truth behind the suspicious behavior of two women who are regularly chartering flights. Suspecting them of drug trafficking, McCone begins picking up clues and is imagining the worst when she uncovers the truth. The women come clean with their employer about their moonlighting activities with another restaurant, but they haven’t done anything illegal. In a neat twist at the end, the real criminal element is uncovered, with the incriminating evidence hidden in fast-food containers.

In “Knives at Midnight,” McCone takes a job in her hometown as a favor to her older brother, John, who assisted in, or meddled in, depending on one’s point of view, one of her earlier cases, Wolf in the Shadows (1993). A couple that John knows is searching for answers about their son’s murder in Tijuana. McCone uncovers the unfortunate truth that the reformed addict had returned to using drugs and was also dealing drugs. With her quirky habit of reading obscure statutes, McCone provides law enforcement personnel with information they can use to charge the killer in California, even though the murder took place in Tijuana.

Muller has also developed characters from the novels in her short stories. Notably, her nephew, Mick Savage, who joins the team in Till the Butchers Cut Him Down (1992) and makes a huge impact on her work with his computer skills, was introduced in a 1990 short story “Silent Night.” Rae Kelleher, the first assistant McCone hires in the series, also grows through Muller’s short-story output, with several stories following her as the primary investigator.

Michael Connelly

Michael Connelly began his writing career as a crime beat reporter in Florida. Being a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize led to a job offer from the Los Angeles Times. He eventually parlayed that experience into writing fiction. He has published fifteen novels featuring Los Angeles police detective Harry Bosch, along with some stand-alone novels and several others featuring lawyer Mickey Haller. Bosch often plays a minor role in these works.

Connelly has written extensively in the short-story genre as well, with many of the stories chronicling cases that Bosch handles. Like Muller, Connelly has used the short-story form to supplement and enhance Bosch’s character development. In “Father’s Day,” included in The Best American Mystery Stories 2009 (2009), Bosch and his partner are called out on Father’s Day to a parking lot where a child has been found dead. The father of the child is distraught and claims that, because of a number of incidents and distractions, he forgot his son was with him and not with his mother and that leaving the boy in the locked car was an accident. Bosch digs for the truth, which is that the parents, both high-powered real estate brokers, couldn’t handle taking care of the boy, who had been born with numerous medical problems. Interspersed with the details of the investigation, readers see Bosch talk on the phone with his daughter. She had been alluded to in several of the novels but had not become a fully developed character. In the contributor notes to the volume, Connelly explains that he is planning to write a novel in which Bosch’s relationship with his daughter will play a central role, and that he used this as “sort of a training exercise” for Bosch to deal with his thoughts about being a father.

Bibliography

Acocella, Joan. “Queen of Crime: How Agatha Christie Created the Modern Murder Mystery.” The New Yorker (August 16/23, 2010): p. 82-88. Acocella explores the evolution of the genre through Christie’s career. A readable piece that is filled with interesting information.

Herbert, Rosemary, ed. The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Essays and brief entries by hundreds of authorities span every conceivable aspect of the genre, making this an invaluable reference work for the student, casual reader, and scholar.

Kayman, Martin A. “The Short Story from Poe to Chesterton.” In The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Martin Priestman. Cambridge, England; Cambridge University Press, 2003. This section will be of particular interest to those looking for information about the development of the genre. The work as a whole is a useful reference tool for all genres, eras, styles, and writers of crime fiction in eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth century England and America.

Moore, Lewis D. Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective: A Critical History from the 1920’s to the Present. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2006. Traces the development of the private investigator subgenre from the early days of Chandler and Hammett to current practitioners.

Penzler, Otto, ed. The Best American Mystery Stories. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997-    . Along with providing a variety of the best fiction, each volume includes interesting introductions from Penzler and the editor for each volume. Of particular interest will be the contributors’ notes, which include information from the authors about their stories.

Rzepka, Charles J. Detective Fiction. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Rzepka’s well-written survey of the genre pays particular attention to the development of scientific investigative methods and cultural issues that shaped the genre. Includes specific essays on Poe, Doyle, Sayers, and Chandler.

Symons, Julian. Bloody Murder. New York: Mysterious Press, 1993. By a leading critic and mystery-fiction writer, this is one of the most thorough, balanced, and readable histories and critical analyses of the genre ever published. Although a bit dated now, it remains indispensable both for the fan and for the student of crime fiction.